The Gay Bride

Gold-digging chorus girl (Carole Lombard) marries a dim-witted gangster (Nat Pendleton) for his money. His gangster cronies are jealous and scheme against him for a shot at Lombard. Kind of gross, right? Meanwhile, bodyguard Chester Morris has been protecting Carole and she starts to fall for him. Unbelievably, Chester is supposed to be honest and decent, despite working for gangsters. Weird.

Carole's gorgeous and has fun banter with Chester Morris. Nice supporting cast including Zasu Pitts, Sam Hardy, and Leo Carrillo. Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson has an uncredited bit part. Funny gangster screwball comedy. Lombard's only movie for MGM and reportedly the movie she considered to be her worst. I can't see why. It wasn't her best but I thought it was fun.

Gay Bride, The (1934)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A gold-digging chorus girl (Carole Lombard) decides to the only way to get rich is by marrying gangsters and hoping that they get killed so that all their money will go to her. She finds one dimwitted gangster (Nat Pendleton) to marry her but his bodyguard (Chester Morris) can see right through her. This comedy has some truly great moments in it but overall there aren't enough constant laughs to make it a complete winner. I was surprised to learn that this was the only film Lombard made for MGM but she turns in a fine performance. Her role isn't the greatest but the screenplay does offer her plenty of nice one-liners and for the most part she hits everyone of them. Pendleton is also very good as the dumb gangster who can't see that his wife is just after his money. It's Morris who steals the show however with his perfect comic timing. The screenplay does his character more justice than anyone else and Morris uses it to his advantage with countless great lines and some truly hysterical moments including a scene at a will reading. Zasu Pitts is wasted in her small role of Lombard's friend. The screenplay doesn't have enough laughs to carry the 80-minute running time but if you're a fan of the two stars then the film should keep you entertained.

Carole's busy cleaning out her new husband, the always oafish Nat Pendleton, under the watchful but none-too-concerned eye of 'Office Boy' (who makes these names up?) played energetically by Chester Morris. You don't have to be a neurosurgeon to see how this one ends up. Several of her husband's cronies have eyes for her and Chester pretty much sits back and makes with the Jimmy Cagney-type wisecracks until he's inevitably needed to save Carole from the mess she's created. Car nuts will like the scene at the Mercedes dealer where she's buying a 1934 540K Roadster (deliberately paying too much) and cringe over Pendleton testing the bulletproof aspects of his armored limo. Made at the dawn of the infamous Production Code, THE GAY BRIDE is a lot like Warner's pre-code program entries only with MGM's added element of class. Carole's a pro and Chester Morris rates an 'A' for effort.

This lesser-known film is a very pleasant, not really expected surprise in the early career of Carole Lombard, at the moment it was really starting to take off. It offers her as many opportunities to start showing the full range of her acting skills as more well-known films of the same period such as Twentieth Century - while being clearly less ambitious, I find it also much more tightly scripted than the latter and her co-star Chester Morris whom I did not know is surprisingly good, while all supporting characters are top-notch as well. Basically this is just a comedy in the mob's' world of the Prohibition, though, but it is both a fast-paced and smartly-acted one, and with two main characters which actually are fairly original. Mary is a gold digger with no more moral compass than a boiled clam. She considers herself fully entitled, by the rights of a penniless lonely woman who has to fend for herself, to put her hands on any pot of gold no matter how - so far nothing that original, one thinks of the gritty character of Barbara Stanwyck in Baby Face the same year. However Carole Lombard makes Mary so breezily, unconsciously and innocently amoral, if one may say, that even when she drives her would-be gangster benefactors to kill one another in order to provide her with the booty she greedily and self-mindedly covets, nobody seems really able to keep her a grudge. That makes her a sort of screwball cousin of Lulu / Pandora, the innocent fatal woman who made an unforgettable icon of Louise Brooks. She is toxic, even lethally so, but that's not really her fault - and she's so pretty... One who is not really able to blame her is her co-hero, the even more originally scripted bodyguard-cum-bookkeeper (!!) character strangely nicknamed Office Boy. This is a hero who talks a lot and acts fairly little, though he knows how to keep being respected by the violent mobsters he knowingly works for, while refusing to get involved in the dirty parts of their trade. But, mind you, not because he feels them repulsive, if that was the case he should have quit much earlier. No, rather because he feels this is not worth the risks to him, he prefers the idea of a fixed, not so big though adequate salary, which he can earn without having to spoil his hands. Not a full-fledged gangster, certainly, but not really a knight in a shining armour of moral rectitude either. Office Boy insistently tries to dissuade Mary of marrying Shoots Magiz, the top gangster who is really crazy about her and later becomes an irreproachably devoted husband - again not for moral reasons but just because as a partner for a long and quiet married life, Shoot offers limited perspectives, which gets confirmed to have been quite true. Later on as he tries again to object to Mary's shenanigans finding ways to get rich with dirty money, his arguments keep on being the same - not that her ways are evil, but that they are very likely to put her into deep trouble. True again. And when he leaves the mob, one cannot be too sure that it is because he finally saw the light about these evil ways - rather that the gang war makes them too unsafe, and he prefers quitting once he has put aside enough money to live the quiet, modest life he craves. Interesting mob character indeed.

Carole Lombard is great, it's somewhat forgotten how good she was at delivering the one liners. She gets off some good ones as the golddigging chorus line girl who marries a gangster. The fact that the life expectancy of a gangster is short only complicates her plans. The film goes a off the rails when she falls for one of them. It would have been more fun to watch her carry on as she had but she is still worth watching. Zazu Pitts in a funny supporting role.